How Zapier added collaborative features to their Canvas product in just a couple of weeks

Challenge

Zapier is the world’s largest automation platform. Their mission is to enable automation for everyone, making it easy to connect apps together without knowing how to code.

Historically, Zapier had been a product designed for use by one or two individuals within an organization. Typically, those people would set up the automations needed for the business once and forget about it. But to continue to grow their business, it became increasingly important to create a comprehensive suite of tools that facilitate app-building for anyone in the organization—not just one or two power users.

That’s the challenge the "New Products" team at Zapier started taking on in 2023. One of the tools they recently released is Canvas, an AI‑powered diagramming tool for planning, building, and vizualizing workflows. And of course, it had to have all the collaborative table stakes features people are used to.

Solution

Two engineers decided to try out Liveblocks during Zapier’s hack week to see how far they could go. In a couple of days, they were able to turn Canvas from a single-player application to multiplayer.

“I have fallen in love with Liveblocks. It was a miracle, we found your solution and it just worked. We had a team do a hack week project where they integrated Liveblocks and we were blown away that two engineers could do all of this in just one week.”

Michael SholtySenior Software Engineer at Zapier

This was such a success that the leadership team decided it was worth taking it into production. To help with that, the Liveblocks team worked hand-in-hand with the legal and security teams at Zapier to make sure all requirements were met.

A month later, Zapier decided to test out Liveblocks Comments to see if they could add a commenting system to Canvas before their upcoming public launch—a feature that was originally planned two quarters down the line… Within a couple of weeks, they were not only able to add a fully working commenting system to Canvas, they also integrated it all with Liveblocks Notifications—the notification system designed for collaboration.

Results

With Liveblocks, the Zapier team was able to add table stakes collaborative features like realtime multiplayer editing, comments, and notifications to Canvas in just a couple of weeks. This enabled Zapier to test and validate collaborative use-cases without needing to invest months of engineering time.

“Liveblocks has enabled us to test and validate collaborative use‑cases without needing to invest several months of dev time into a solution that might work. It helps us de-risk our roadmap meaningfully, especially for a small team.”

Luke ThomasDirector of New Products at Zapier

If you’d like to make your product collaborative, we have many open-source examples available.